And I Shall Have Some Peace There

December 13, 2010
Roach is best known for her popular and critically acclaimed gardening blog, A Way to Garden. In this personal memoir, she describes her transformation as she sheds her corporate carapace as editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and begins life in a small upstate New York town. She expects to find peace and solitude there, a place to discern a new identity, independent of her professional success. Instead, she finds herself untethered and unexpectedly fearful of snakes, snow storms, and silence. A circuitous spiritual journey follows as Roach consults with an assortment of shamans and matchmakers and the occasional exterminator. She eventually finds some ballast in the deeper rhythms of country life and the reliable kindness of neighbors. Roach’s gardening writing on her blog and in her previous book (A Way to Garden) is clear, thorough, and thoughtful. Readers may appreciate her candid, stream-of-consciousness style in this memoir, but it is too unstructured and inchoate to be as satisfying as her other work.

Starred review from December 1, 2010

The story of a successful 50-something woman who chose to quit a high-powered Manhattan job, move to the country and reinvent her life.

In 2008, Roach gave up a lucrative editorial position at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and chose "a path towards things they don't necessarily pay you or pat you on the back for." She moved to a small country house in upstate New York and immersed herself in her passion for gardening. The transition was not easy. Because she was so accustomed to doing rather than simply being, the slower pace of life felt alien to her. Worse, the nagging desire for a "happily ever after" with a man still persisted. Eventually, Roach found companionship in a half-wild stray tomcat. Unlike the other males she had known in her life, the cat "promise[d] nothing he couldn't deliver." Other animals—frogs, birds and snakes—became "teachers" who initiated her into the mysteries of metamorphosis and rebirth. Through the lessons these creatures offered, the author learned to embrace change, welcome the shedding of her old identity and understand that she, like them, was "twice-born." In the daily routine of planting, trimming, composting and harvesting, she discovered simple yet profound truths that she had overlooked in her former fast-paced life. The limits imposed by the author's perspective are cast into relief by a setting that is also kept within defined boundaries—in this case, the writer's home and garden. Yet within the narrow confines of her world, Roach found a creative freedom that reveals itself in the charmingly quirky language she uses to chronicle her quotidian adventures. What distinguishes this "back to the land" memoir from others like it is that it makes a quiet but important statement of modern female autonomy and agency. As the author lived her dream of corporate escape and fell in love with the solitary life, she expressed personal power while exercising a choice that had not always been open to career women.

A moving, eloquent and joyously idiosyncratic memoir.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2011
Perhaps its the twenty-first centurys most existential question: who am I if not my e-mail address? After leaving her coveted position as editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Roach deleted the @ and dot-com from the end of her name and suddenly found herself adrift in both the cyber world of instant access and the concrete world of dwindling bank accounts. More rudderless than any 50-year-old woman with a solid-gold reputation (and AmEx card) should be, Roach retreated to her weekend getaway home in upstate New York and turned it into her primary residence and place of business. She was now Margaret Roach, Inc., but what would she produce? A keen observer of the avian and amphibian life sheltered by her country property, city-girl Roach took comfort in their rituals and habits, adopting what she could for her own unsettled existence. As she moves through the seasons of her first year in self-imposed exile, Roach limns a reflective odyssey for affirmation and acceptance that blends Zen-like wisdom with zany escapades.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)